From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Expanded Second Edition)

by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Angela Y. Davis (Foreword by)

Overview

The eruption of mass protests in the wake of the police murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City have challenged the impunity with which officers of the law carry out violence against Black people and punctured the illusion of a postracial America. The Black Lives Matter movement has awakened a new generation of activists.

In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781642594553
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	06/01/2021
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	676,386
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, which won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018. Her third book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, was a finalist for a National Book Award for nonfiction, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History.

Taylor is a Contributing Opinion Writer for the New York Times and a columnist at The New Yorker. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation, Jacobin, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, among others.

Table of Contents

Foreword Angela Y. Davis xii

Introduction Black Awakening in Obama's America 1

Chapter 1 A Culture of Racism 21

Chapter 2 From Civil Rights to Colorblind 51

Chapter 3 Black Faces in High Places 75

Chapter 4 The Double Standard of Justice 107

Chapter 5 Barack Obama: The End of an Illusion 135

Chapter 6 Black Lives Matter: A Movement, Not a Moment 153

Chapter 7 From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation 191

Chapter 8 Where Is the Black Lives Matter Movement Headed? 221

Acknowledgments 239

Notes 243

Index 277

Study and Discussion Guide 291

Editorial Reviews

"This brilliant book is the best analysis we have of the #BlackLivesMatter moment of the long struggle for freedom in America. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has emerged as the most sophisticated and courageous radical intellectual of her generation."
Dr. Cornel West

"Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's searching examination of the social, political and economic dimensions of the prevailing racial order offers important context for understanding the necessity of the emerging movement for black liberation."
Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

"From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is an essential read for anyone following the movement for Black Lives. The text chronicles a portion of history we rarely ever see, while also bringing together data and deep primary source research in a way that lucidly explains the origins of the current moment."
Los Angeles Review of Books

"Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 's has not written the average rushed first-wave book on a social movement. Taylor, a professor of African American studies- at Princeton, is the rare academic writer whose sense of humor is as sharp as her scholarship. She 's written a sweeping yet concise history not just of the Black Lives Matter movement, but of the past seven years under the first black president and of how the 20th century led to our current state of woke uprising. It 's full of gems of historical insight and it fearlessly tackles what black liberation looks like when it happens in a black-governed city 40 miles from a black-occupied White House."
Steven Thrasher, The Guardian

"Class Matters! In this clear-eyed, historically informed account of the latest wave of resistance to state violence, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor not only exposes the canard of color-blindness but reveals how structural racism and class oppression are joined at the hip. If today 's rebels ever expect to end inequality and racialized state violence, she warns, then capitalism must also end. And that requires forging new solidarities, envisioning a new social and economic order, and pushing a struggle to protect Black Lives to its logical conclusion: a revolution capable of transforming the entire nation."
Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

"With political eloquence, intellectual rigor, and an unapologetically left analysis,the brilliant scholar-activist Keeanga Taylor has provided a powerful contribution to our collective understanding of the current stage of the Black freedom struggle in the United States, how we arrived at this point, and what battles we need to fight in order to truly achieve liberation. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is a must read for everyone who is serious about the ongoing praxis of freedom."
Barbara Ransby, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision

"Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has a strong voice, a sharp mind and a clear, readable style that all come together in this penetrating, vital analysis of race and class at this critical moment in America's racial history."
Gary Younge, editor-at-large for the Guardian

"Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor brings the long history of Black radical theorizing and scholarship into the neoliberal 21st century with From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Her strong voice is deeply needed at a time when young activists are once again reforging a Black liberation movement that is under constant attack. Deeply rooted in Black radical, feminist and socialist traditions, Taylor 's book is an outstanding example of the type of analysis that is needed to build movements for freedom and self-determination in a far more complicated terrain than that confronted by the activists of the 20th century. Her book is required reading for anyone interested in justice, equality and freedom."
Michael C. Dawson, author of Blacks In and Out of the Left

From the Publisher